D&D 5E Time and the Fey wild

[ArwensDaughter]

One of my players recently asked about how I am handling time in the Feywild in our campaign; specifically that in some versions of the Feywild, time runs differently than in the material plane. The question arose because another player is going to be changing characters soon, and wants to create a tie between her new character and one of the existing ones, and they were discussing possibilities and options. The player who approached me (and whose character is staying in the game) spent time in the Feywild, and the backstory of the new character Player B is considering has fey connections as well, so they were discussing possible connections.

I hadn’t really thought about it, although I do now remember that being a thing in one of the AL adventures in the “giants” season. Since my players asked about it, and since there is a possibility that the party could end up in the Feywild, I realized I best thing that through. If you have run the Feywild that way, I’d be interested in hearing how that worked and how you determined the time differential. I’m assuming, given the unpredictable nature of the Feywild that it wouldn’t be a stable ratio/calculation, but something that was rather random.

And yes, I know Witchlight is coming out soon and may provide answers. I’m really hoping I can poach it for a possible adventure in the Feywild, without using the carnival aspect. But I’d like to start pondering the time thing now, rather than wait for Witchlight.

 

[MarkB]

Most likely, different in different times and places, but also at the whim of powerful fey. The classic example is the mortal who spends a single night at the fey queen's court, only to find when he returns that a century has passed in the mortal realm.

In particular, I'd make sure it's not something that players can game or leverage in any reliable fashion, at least not unless they're intimately connected to the realm or its denizens and maybe not even then.

 

[Oofta]

In my campaign world time in the fey wild isn't necessarily faster or slower, it's different. I kind of liken it to a rubber band, sometimes it stretches, sometimes it snaps back. Over the long term time more or less matches up, but that's long term. Add in that certain fey lords can control time in their domain causing the equivalent of eddies or rapids in a river.

Add it all up and time flows depending on plot and story. The only thing you will know is that it always flows forward and that you will never know until you get back to the real world how much time there has passed.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

I think time flows in the Feywild however you want it to flow. It could speed up, slow down, ore maybe even run backwards depending on what is most fun for the campaign.

The classic example is the mortal who spends a single night at the fey queen's court, only to find when he returns that a century has passed in the mortal realm.

This is the first thing I thought of too. Maybe Character B is the grandparent of Character A. Everybody thought Character B died decades ago, but they've actually been in the feywild the whole time, and for them it's only been a day, so when they come out they are the same age as Character A. Or maybe they went into the Feywild together and B got lost and either no time passed for them or a lot of time passed and they're really old.

 

[RangerWickett]

In one of the ZEITGEIST adventures the party gets stuck in the Dreaming (our fey realm), and has to solve a murder to get back home in time to avert a disaster.

They're explicitly told that rushing here won't help. The Dreaming likes drama, and whenever they manage to make it home will end up being in the nick of time.

 

[Lyxen]

In my campaign world time in the fey wild isn't necessarily faster or slower, it's different. I kind of liken it to a rubber band, sometimes it stretches, sometimes it snaps back. Over the long term time more or less matches up, but that's long term. Add in that certain fey lords can control time in their domain causing the equivalent of eddies or rapids in a river.

Add it all up and time flows depending on plot and story. The only thing you will know is that it always flows forward and that you will never know until you get back to the real world how much time there has passed.

I confess that I do exactly the same. I consider time as a story/plot device in general, because the idea is for things never to be boring for players, but even more so in the Feywild (and to a slightly less extent in the Shadowfell) because I can stretch it one direction or the other at will.

And I love that concept so much that, in a LARP, a player had to defeat a Fey guardian, who was way too strong for her. There were various ways to trick him, in particular because he felt guilty about his guardianship and denying the player access to her daughter. And one of the way was using this guilt to ask the fey guardian for training in combat (which was fun because the NPC was a really good fencer), so that after years and years of training, the player could defeat the guardian in combat. This is what the player choose, and we had make up ready for this, to make her look older including white hair spray... The player loved it, although it was a bit of a sad story because she recovered her daughter but had lost 30 years of life in the bargain.

 

[jgsugden]

I use the Time Warp rules for the Feywild in the DMG for when a creature leaves the Feywild, but I roll the dice when they enter the Feywild so that I know their scenario and can start to plan for it. When a group enters together, they all get the same die roll. If they enter at different times, it is different rolls. This may mean that two PCs returning at the same time might arrive hours, days, weeks, months or years apart.

This did result in me putting a game on hiatus. There were multiple groups in the same campaign world adventuring at the same time. One went to the Feywild and spent over a week there, and they'd rolled the 20 to have their days in the Feywild be years in the Prime. I think it was a 9 year delay. When they returned home, they found it in ruins, and their lone surviving ally told them they'd been gone so long, and that disaster had taken place in their absence. We took a hiatus for about 6 months from that game and started new characters in the original time frame for a finite adventure. During that time I dropped hints to the players in the other two groups that the apocalypse situation the hiatus group had seen was starting to come to pass (there were crossover players), and I built all three active games towards events that could stop the apocalypse. Then we returned to the hiatus game and gave them a chance to explore the apocalypse and then do a time travel story to go back and stop the apocalypse by advising the other three groups. It was ambitious, it didn't work as well as I'd have liked, but I think I could do better now.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

I have a chart from the Gary Gygax's old Dangerous Journey's 'Epic of AErth'.

It's full of tables for going to the Faerie. Changes in gravity, time changes, differences in physics and stuff.
"All characters breath water like it's air", "all spells are maximized", "Every foot of distance is 1 mile", "flora is mobile" "gravity is doubled", "water flows backwards and uphill", "All vision is telescopic", "Time is tripled", "the wind sounds like harps" etc....

Lots of cool stuff. Just roll for an event along with its duration reach. I can post a picture of the page(s) is you want to use it.

 

[ArwensDaughter]

@jgsugden: Thank you for pointing me to the (optional) rules in the DMG. Don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to look there.

@TaranTheWanderer: Sounds like an interesting chart. I’d like to see if if you don’t mind.

@Mark B: thanks for the warning/caveat, but I’m not too worried about that with my players.

 

[Weiley31]

Court of The Shadow Fey legit has this happen within it: At the VERY end of the module once you finish everything and get back to the Material Plane, an entire year has passed, despite only dealing with the module in the course of what is assumed to be a couple of days. Time ultimately flows completely different within the Feywild.